Quotes About Single-mindedness

Years ago, a drug addict said something very profound to me. He said I didn't understand about addiction. His life was only about one thing: getting drugs. It simplified his life in that all the other things people have to think about, worry about, and deal with—he didn't. His life wasn't easy, but it was simple, cut down to what he could cope with. You will find this same attitude in people who try to reduce life to only one thing. This includes being obsessed about danger.

Live for an ideal, and that one ideal alone. Let it be so great, so strong, that there may be nothing else left in the mind; no place for anything else, no time for anything else.

When I was single my career was my life, so everything I did was of grave importance and was greatly disturbing.

I feel like my whole life only tennis.

'Obsession' has a bad rap.

If you work hard at something, you can forget everything else.

The field of consciousness is tiny. It accepts only one problem at a time. Get into a fist fight, put your mind on the strategy of the fight, and you will not feel the other fellow's punches.

But a person can believe something so hard they lose sight of everything else.

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously . . .

Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bull-necked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, 'An unimportant obstacle.

I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change

I was obsessed. I wouldn't quit. My grades suffered. I didn't care.

Men who have embraced one idea can live only by and for that idea. Beyond it, they have nothing but their memories.

it is here that Spinoza is in the right—a life dominated by a single passion is a narrow life, incompatible with every kind of wisdom.

The strongest man is always the man of one idea. Devoting to it all his energy, his will, his intelligence, his nervous tension, he often becomes irresistible. Mary Baker was one of these exemplars among monomaniacs, for from 1862 onwards she possessed, or rather was possessed by, one idea and one only.

George is very, very single-minded in his approach. And I think a lot of the things that he has said and done have been misconstrued as arrogant rather than the single-mindedness they really are.

When it comes time for basketball, everything else is kind of irrelevant.

Focusing is the great secret of power. If you want to use your full amount of focus, you must close down all other thought and direct your power of generating mental steam toward one outcome.

En el Diccionario del diablo, Ambrose Bierce escribió que «la definición de fanatismo es redoblar tus esfuerzos después de que tu objetivo haya sido olvidado».

The only thing more dangerous then a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom window open got channeled into some other interest, with merciless and painstaking efficiency...

I can focus on just one thing - that's basketball.

Be like a postage stamp— stick to one thing until you get there." —Josh Billings

Be like a postage stamp— stick to one thing until you get there.